Eric Michael Thomas grew up watching his mother recover from two miscarriages in their California home. With no one else to step in, he started cooking. He was just a kid, but he noticed something: the food helped. Her mood lifted. She could get through the day.
That observation never left him. Now, as a Melrose resident in the Bronx, Thomas is building Chef Doula LLC, a business that pairs nutritional support with doula care for pregnant and postpartum mothers.
“This is something that’s been practiced in homes since the beginning of time,” Thomas told the Bronx Times.
The path to entrepreneurship was not straight. During the pandemic, Thomas lost his job and at points lost his housing too. He had spent years working in restaurant kitchens and preschool classrooms, and somewhere in that stretch of instability, he began to see how those two worlds could fit together. He launched Chef Doula as his first business venture, drawing on both his culinary background and a growing body of training in maternal care.
Thomas is currently an apprentice with Ancient Song, a Brooklyn-based doula organization, and is pursuing an associate’s degree in culinary arts at Kingsborough Community College. He has also completed entrepreneurship programs through Good Shepherd Services, the SUNY Bronx Educational Opportunity Center, and NYCHA’s Food Business Pathways initiative.
The business is taking shape at a moment when the Bronx faces a documented maternal health crisis. The borough records high rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, and preterm births. Holistic birth centers are scarce across New York City, and the Bronx has none. Thomas says that shortage leaves women, particularly women of color, without adequate support at one of the most vulnerable points in their lives.
“Nowhere near enough access” is how he describes the current situation. When holistic care is unavailable, he argues, childbirth becomes “commercialized,” with hospital processes rushed and women’s wishes pushed aside. The 2020 death of Amber Rose Isaac at Montefiore Einstein hospital remains one of the starkest examples of what that can look like. Isaac died during childbirth shortly after publicly describing the care she was receiving as “incompetent.”
Thomas is waiting on Medicaid certification, which he sees as a prerequisite for the model he actually wants to run. Right now, he can only serve clients of Ancient Song who pay out of pocket for his additional cooking and meal prep services. That access barrier is exactly what he wants to dismantle. Doula and nutrition support should not be reserved for people who can afford to pay privately, he says.
His long-term vision is more expansive. He wants to bring in-home cooking and meal preparation to mothers wherever they are, including women living in homeless shelters, using a commercial kitchen to make it work logistically. Further out, he wants to open a combined culinary hub and birth center in the Bronx, or several of them, that can serve as complete resources for families from pregnancy through the postpartum period.
The concept draws on something older than any certification or business plan. Cultures around the world have long centered food as part of recovery and care after birth. Thomas is formalizing that tradition, layering professional culinary training on top of doula apprenticeship to create something that does not yet have an established category in the city’s healthcare and social services infrastructure.
That is part of what makes the Medicaid certification so significant. Getting the service coded into the reimbursement system means it exists, officially, as something the public health apparatus recognizes and pays for. Without that, it stays a private luxury.
The Bronx has no shortage of need. It has a shortage of options. Thomas is trying to build one from scratch, out of a childhood memory of cooking for his mother and years of work in kitchens and classrooms that most people would not have thought to connect.
He is connecting them. The city should be paying attention.
